Primrose's Blog

You may be reading the title of this blog post, and may remember what I wrote in a blog post about how I was going to run Windows because I just didn't care.

Well, I changed my mind. For good reason too. I absolutely HATE how bloated Windows is out of the box. A multitude of garbage Microsoft Store apps that no one asked for. Solitaire collection? Xbox Game Pass? The wish.com version of outlook? Tiktok? No thank you. I absolutely hate having all of this garbage preinstalled on what is supposed to be a fresh install of Windows. It is a shame that the first thing I do on any install of windows is run a debloat tool. That just shows you how screwed Windows has become in the past eight years, maybe even more if you count the disaster that was Windows 8.

Plus, there are also all of these extra garbage processes running in the background consuming my CPU power, and leave me at about 150 processes on a cold boot. Onedrive? I don't even use the damn thing. Work or School Account? I'm not even signed in with a Microsoft account, so why the hell are you running? Antimalware Service Executable? Stop running all the damn time and consuming my power.

Even after setting a lot of background services to manual, which only starts them if needed by another program, the performance on Windows is still horrendous. Tasks as simple as opening up LibreOffice Writer take 10 seconds, that's right, 10 freaking seconds. Meanwhile, on my Arch Linux install, it only takes a second at most. Even opening up PowerShell takes 5-8 seconds. It's absolutely ridiculous.

Sure, my hardware may be on the "older" side (ThinkPad T460 from 2016), but it's still got plenty of punch left in it, and Windows decides to be an absolute fool with resource management.

So yeah, I went back to my beloved Unix system. I went with the Linux distribution Arch Linux again, and it's nice and functional, with none of the bullshit. I love the "everything is a file", and "do one thing and do it right" philosophy of Unix too much. I can't ever leave it for too long, I just end up coming right back to it because it's so good. If anyone wants me to stop using Unix as my operating system of choice, they will have to pry my computer away from my cold dead hands before I allow that.

Signed,

Primrose

So, today I decided to move my reverse proxy over from a Debian GNU/Linux VM over to a FreeBSD VM.

I don't really have much of a reason for it, other than trying to learn more about working with the BSDs, which I've been trying to do for a little while now.

It was really easy, and I only had a slight learning curve with getting things working on FreeBSD, which were really just small things like directories being in different places than I am used to. But overall, it is a familiar experience for me, and not much is different about FreeBSD, since it is a Unix system, and I am quite familiar with Unix and Unix-like systems. No one should notice any differences in page response times, since it's really just a minor under the hood change.

If anything starts acting weird that wasn't acting weird before, feel free to email me at primrose[at]primrose[dot]cafe.

Signed,

Primrose